Thoughts on US-China Competition

I have had the Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia from June 27 open for some time now. I thought I wanted to sign it, but got stuck on the first paragraphs multiple times:

Everyone's debating whether AI is a bubble while missing the real story. Two things are true: there's a massive AGI fantasy bubble built on geopolitical panic, AND a genuine ML revolution happening at ground level.

One "DeepSeek Moment" wasn't enough for us to wake up, hopefully we don't need a third.

Academic and journalist

The OpenElections project collects detailed election data for the USA, all the way down to the precinct level. This is a surprisingly hard problem: while county and state-level results are …

If you liked Brooklyn Bridge Claude, you'll love White Genocide Grok

The DeepSeek Narrative Takes the World by Storm DeepSeek took the world by storm. For the last week, DeepSeek has been the only topic that anyone in the world wants to talk about. As it currently s…

The controversy around DeepSeek's costs for training their R1 model shook up the markets, but it seems like there was a lot of deception.

If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

A leading misinformation expert is being accused of citing non-existent sources to defend Minnesota’s new law banning election misinformation. Professor Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, is “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology,” according to his Stanford biography.  At the behest of Minnesota Attorney General Keith […]

Earnest chats with objects are not so unusual. Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, the famed Detroit Tiger, used to stand on the pitching mound whispering to the baseball. Forky, the highly animate utensil from Toy Story 4, once posed deep questions about friendship to a ceramic mug. And many of us have made repeated queries of the Magic 8 Ball despite its limited set of randomly generated answers.

The fracking to AI pipeline is a crime. And the crime is homicide.

An excellent debunking by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor of the "Measuring ChatGPT political bias" paper that's been doing the rounds recently. It turns out that paper didn't even test …

New research explains you’ll get more right- or left-wing answers, depending on which AI model you ask.

Claiming wisdom based on the Bhagavad Gita, the bots frequently go way off script.

As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?

This video is from a presentation at a private gathering in San Francisco on March 9th with leading technologists and decision-makers with the ability to influence…

The letter has been signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Andrew Yang, and leading AI researchers, but many experts and even signatories disagreed.

Misinformation, labor impact, and safety are all risks. But not in the way the letter implies.

Elon Musk has sounded the alarm about "the danger of training AI to be woke." Now he wants to build an anti-woke alternative to ChatGPT.